A breakthrough in cross-channel marketing happened today, but not a lot of people have not yet realised the impact that it will have.  For the first time, there is a direct correlation between seeing digital facebook adverts and an increase in in-store footfall.

It was Einstein who first came up with the idea that all forces are united which totally revolutionized Physics and how we perceived our world.  The announcement yesterday by IKEA’s agencies Vizeum and iProspect, for us in digital is equally earth shattering.  

Facebook Adverts increase IKEA Store Traffic – yes really!

These two agencies have conducted a study by whereby they found:

The results showed an 11 per cent increase in store visits among more than 172,000 people that were served (facebook) adverts, compared to an otherwise identical and equally-sized group that had not seen the adverts.

By meshing together data from EE’s Geo Fence network with the data from Facebook, they were able to find that there was a clear increase in people visiting stores resulting in further footfall.

Analytics for the real World?

We have known and been able to measure for a long time how people engage with digital advertising to interact online with brands.  Tools like Google Analytics, Adobe analytics and Webtrends are able to do this with a great deal of sophistication.  For the first time we actually have an interesting bit of public data that proves the link of online activity to actions in the “real world”.

The advent of mobile and geofencing technologies ( like similar technologies from companies like Weve)  will result in a new generation of tools that will help us to use digital in new and interesting ways.  As these “new breed” technologies develop further, I can see these tools evolving into a future “Google Analytics solution for in-store” which becomes indispensable to any retail manager.

A less private future?

To quote from the Spiderman movies, “With great power comes great responsibility”.  These tools will only be as effective as the audiences willing to participate in them.  EE  have already shown to be a bit naughty when it comes to respecting their customers such as recently charging customers 50p to skip the line of their customer service telephone queues , instead of putting on more staff.

I hope that EE will make sure that customers who don’t want to be tracked, will have the opt outs available and will make sure that any data that is passed on, is suitably secured and anonymised which I am sure they will do.

Going forward, this could be a really valuable tool that finally shows that digital is actually more effective than other traditional media channels of TV and Radio and will become the “de-facto” way to engage and discover new customers.

Thanks

Many thanks to Gerry for the tip off on this.  If any of you have something interesting that you think would warrant a blog post,  then please get in touch.